[HN Gopher] Ask HN: I miss Usenet. Are there any modern equivale...
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Ask HN: I miss Usenet. Are there any modern equivalents?
Much as the title says, I really miss the Usenet days where I could
contribute to a bulletin board-style forum on hyper-specific
subjects. If I remember my computing history correctly, Google
ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups. I'm
not sure if this is dead yet. Arguably, Reddit fills some of this
niche, but Usenet was tech-focused, generally quite professional
and frankly didn't have the same clientele as Reddit does. HN is
topic-focused, rather than subject-focused. Would be very
interested to see if there's any Usenet-style project that's still
alive.
Author : mr_gibbins
Score : 219 points
Date : 2022-06-09 14:02 UTC (8 hours ago)
| jks wrote:
| This is not technically Usenet, but you can access various
| mailing lists via NNTP at nntp://news.gmane.io. There used to be
| a browser interface, but apparently that attracted abuse and
| legal threats.
| zuminator wrote:
| stackexchange.com isn't a full replacement but definitely
| fulfills some of the use cases of Usenet.
| kroltan wrote:
| Yep, as long as it's vaguely a "question", the smaller
| communities have very different tolerances to opinion-based-
| ness. It's subject-focused, and the quality is generally pretty
| high (StackOverflow is a different beast though, due to sheer
| scale)
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I think you can find the same vibe in Reddit, some forums and
| some mailing lists.
|
| Also, HN not being subject focused works for me because I am
| interested in more than one subject.
|
| One idea is if HN would introduce some tags, or categories so
| someone can filter if he's only interested in one subject.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Usenet is still there, I download TV shows from it all the time.
| The discussion forums are still there, too, but are completely
| overridden with spam. Most of the public unix [0][1][2] servers
| have a Usenet server that federates with some other tilde
| servers, though not the wider usenet. I stumbled across a group
| called ALTEXXANET [3] that claims to have one, though I've not
| checked to see if it's still there.
|
| What were some of the newsgroups you were interested in? When and
| why did you stop checking them?
|
| [0] http://sdf.org/ [1] https://tildeverse.org/ [2]
| https://tilde.club/wiki/usenet-news.html [3]
| http://www.altexxanet.org/usenet.html
| jdc0589 wrote:
| A friend was still using it for tv/movie download a couple
| years ago too
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I use a feed with no binaries groups, which is how I like it.
| Most groups aren't exactly overrun with spam, they're just not
| very active. One or two spam messages a day looks like a lot
| when actual users are only posting one or two messages a week.
| But if a group is active (like comp.sys.raspberry-pi), you
| hardly notice the spam.
| lrhegeba wrote:
| HackerNews seems a viable alternative with a daily delivery of
| interesting topics, excellent moderators and often highly
| interesting comments from a diverse crowd of users -> check it
| out ;-)
| holler wrote:
| https://sqwok.im has old school forum feel mixed with new age
| chat, with both tech and non-tech ppl.
| zaik wrote:
| Are there any plans to federate using ActivityPub or XMPP or
| some other internet standard?
| jtode wrote:
| I've been thinking about this myself. I made some real-world
| friends from usenet. Not extremely close ones obviously, but I
| hung out mostly in a ng dedicated to a band (Ween) and when I
| travelled to see shows, I always had folks to hang out with even
| if I went alone.
|
| During the high days of that group, there were a number of
| websites dedicated to the band, but usenet was the home (members
| of the band even showed up now and then). Then one day someone
| created the first web forum dedicated to it, and it quickly
| racked up far more users than the newsgroup. The writing was on
| the wall.
|
| I went and created an account but I could not STAND the web forum
| interfaces at the time - compared to Free Agent with its
| conversation threading, the web's early discussion forums were a
| bad, mean joke. But ignorant people for whom internet=www spoke
| in their legions and it was only a couple years before nobody
| came to the usenet forum anymore.
|
| I briefly got into Delphi Forums at the behest of my first gf and
| there was one decent place I hung out in for a few years, but
| looking back, the evolution of right wing ratfucking on the
| internet was in full swing and the people I had lively debates
| with in there eventually became (in many cases) Facebook
| "friends" as we all onboarded there.
|
| And there I lingered till 2016. Reddit is circling the drain at
| this point, even the subs that are dedicated to my own politics
| have become appalling lowest common denominator echo chambers.
|
| I would love to go back to Usenet, much like NYC disco scenesters
| of the 70s would love to go back to Studio 54, but in both cases,
| it was a special place and a special time, and now we live here.
| I wish I had a better answer, but I'm pretty sure that's the
| answer.
| EddieDante wrote:
| You can still access USENET if you have an account on
| <https://www.eternal-september.org/>.
| <https://news.individual.net> works, too, but I think it costs
| ten euros a year.
| pwg wrote:
| At least eternal-september and nntp.aioe.org are free access --
| but both have text only newsgroups, no binaries groups.
| bitwize wrote:
| There's a reason for that. Binaries groups were historically
| dens of piracy and CSAM. They consume HUGE amounts of traffic
| and hosting them presents liability issues to the providers.
| nisegami wrote:
| Usenet binary groups still exist and are heavily used for
| piracy.
| Arubis wrote:
| > dens of piracy and CSAM
|
| Tangential, but fascinating that we've binned these
| categories together. The latter is likely orders of
| magnitude more harmful to society.
| Taywee wrote:
| It's not about "harmful to society" in this case, but
| more "illegal, attracting attention from entities that
| make hosting the service much more painful and
| difficult".
|
| More than once, I've had thoughts about developing some
| sort of discussion platform, but binned it because the
| thought of hosting it and having to deal with the not-fun
| problems of reducing spam and handling illegal content
| made it entirely untasteful. At least spam reduction can
| be done entirely on my own terms, but illegal content
| requires me to then coordinate with external companies or
| agencies, report content, figure out how to deal with and
| purge the content (or quarantine and hang onto it hand it
| over when requested), and live with the the pain of
| having to field DLNAs and other copyright claims.
|
| I obviously have different feelings about piracy than I
| do about CSAM, but from a hosting perspective, both are
| just big pain points that make hosting a service where
| people can share non-text content a pain in the ass.
| corrral wrote:
| The former's arguably net-beneficial, in a world with
| effectively eternal copyright terms. It's shouldn't be
| _possible_ for Disney to own so much of the last ~100
| years of popular media, for example, because most of that
| should no longer be ownable.
| bitwize wrote:
| Indeed, but I was just listing them as "two major illegal
| things that binaries newsgroups are used for", not tie
| them together or relate them in a jejune "four horsemen
| of the infocalypse" kind of way.
| cies wrote:
| I'd argue that piracy is beneficial to society. Copyright
| (and most of IP-law) is a scam at this point. 10y is
| enough on any IP-thingy (to have a head start on the rest
| of the market); but that's just my opinion.
|
| Yeah looking at you Mickey Mouse.
| beej71 wrote:
| It sounds like that would be fine with the OP who is looking
| for tech community and discussion.
| emmelaich wrote:
| https://www.techradar.com/au/best/best-usenet-providers (of
| 2022)
|
| Seems to be oriented toward binaries though.
| bluedino wrote:
| My favorite part of usenet was the FAQ's. I didn't have internet
| access at the time but I downloaded the comp.lang.c faq along
| with 3d graphics programming faq from a local BBS. Tons of fun
| reading!
|
| http://www.faqs.org/faqs/C-faq/faq/
|
| The worst part about Facebook groups, Reddit, and even most
| forums is the same questions being repeated over and over. You
| can do sticky threads and links on subreddits (not really sure
| how you would do it on Facebook) but it's not often done.
| Arathorn wrote:
| Matrix is literally intended to be a successor to USENET
| (although we haven't got the long-form async messaging sorted yet
| - https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean/ gives
| a hint of how it could work though)
| Angostura wrote:
| > Arguably, Reddit fills some of this niche, but Usenet was tech-
| focused, generally quite professional and frankly didn't have the
| same clientele as Reddit does
|
| I see you didn't hang out in alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die much
| lambic wrote:
| Or anything in the alt or rec hierarchies really.
| revscat wrote:
| alt.religion.scientology is where many of the secrets around
| Xenu, etc., were originally leaked.
|
| Not all of the alt.* hierarchy was vapid.
| lambic wrote:
| Yep, alt.religion.scientology, alt.tv.northern-exp, and
| news.admin.net-abuse.email were my main hangouts.
| kwoff wrote:
| My first thought when seeing "tech-focused" was "let's see, I
| hung out in alt.atheism... wait, that's like /r/atheism?" (I
| see there's also an /r/nonsequitur/, kinda like
| alt.non.sequitur though the reddit version seems a
| more....attached to reality.)
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Didn't alt.barney.die.die.die.die have more dies? I don't
| remember exactly
|
| Usenet was a cost to ISPs unfortunately. But, it wasn't
| centrally controlled or moderated either. It also was minimally
| technical to use, which served as a good filter.
|
| But I guess reddit's subreddits may be the best alternative
| with viewership and specific groups/areas.
|
| You know... it should be possible with tagging to take
| something like twitter reddit, and generate "views" that are
| groups. Maybe make some spec with three letters, maybe R and an
| S, and heck another S for the hell of it.
|
| Balkanization and content gardens/API walls block integration
| of like minded content.
| armitron wrote:
| Reddit is not an alternative as it is heavily censored (same
| as HN really) and centralized. Usenet still exists and
| discussions still take place there. Being a decentralized
| protocol, censoring (or scoring, killfiling) someone is left
| up to you.
|
| And this is the major advantage of Usenet. You can't be
| silenced by a mob, which leads to freedom of expression and
| disparate views. Sure there is spam and flames, but one gets
| all the tools one needs to deal with that. There is no
| committee deciding what posts should be kept or deleted. We
| are a lot worse off today than we used to be, largely because
| of the centralization of discourse.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Usenet was not driven by advertising, so it wasn't
| constantly pushing "click bait" and other unsolicited
| nefarious content onto its users. You could spew all the
| dumb misinformation you wanted to in your newsgroup, and it
| wouldn't leak into the more sane newsgroups (unless someone
| crossposted).
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Unless you mentioned Turkey, in which case your group
| would suddenly see massive cross-posting by Serdar Argic.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > Sure there is spam and flames, but one gets all the tools
| one needs to deal with that.
|
| Asking the user to implement measures and keep them up-to-
| date is detrimental to adoption from users that are aware
| of curated sources. Pretending this is net-neutral is
| misleading.
|
| > We are a lot worse off today than we used to be, largely
| because of the centralization of discourse.
|
| Usenet was centralized in practice, so I think you mean
| something else. It's not clear how much the curation of
| content stifles discourse when creating new forums is
| essentially free. Either way, I would tend to disagree that
| curated is worse. Everyone curates to some degree, even
| when they are free and open discussions.
| midislack wrote:
| Usenet is just better in this respect. Nobody says
| anybody has to use it.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| The cost to ISPs was mostly in the binaries groups, and some
| usenet servers were set up as a paid service for this purpose
| when ISPs started dropping the binaries groups.
|
| I don't blame the ISPs for this. At the time, you could be an
| ISP with what is essentially a low-end home Internet
| connection now, but it cost thousands per month.
|
| What started the downfall of Usenet was Eternal September
| when AOL let their hoi polloi access the Big Boy Internet.
| The "Me-tooer" phenomenon was particularly irritating.
| amysox wrote:
| You're thinking of the ".word.word.word" convention for
| newsgroup names. The last word would be repeated three times.
| The prototype for this was "alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork,"
| though "alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die" (and the related
| "alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die") came soon thereafter.
|
| The name of the group you're thinking of was probably
| something like "alt.dinosaurs.barney.die.die.die."
| beezle wrote:
| rec.music.gdead was one of the most active usenet groups. IIRC
| rec.arts.books.sf-lovers was also a very popular group. I'm a
| bit nebulous on whether it originated from the mailing list or
| the other way around
|
| There were also quite a few "for sale" type groups, I remember
| when the group for computer equipment was split into about five
| subgroups after it got too big.
|
| Just editing to add - there were also a lot of regional groups,
| one of the earliest and probably biggest was ba.* There were
| also state/country level top levels and a few colleges had
| their own too
| nprz wrote:
| Urbit.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| I have found similar _scenes_ in the p2p /decentralized/dWeb
| protocols groups. Scuttlebutt, Mastadon, DAT/Beaker
| Browser/Hypercore, IPFS, Gun protocol.
|
| If you're interested, the Internet Archive is doing a dWeb Camp
| where a bunch of these folks will be coming together in the
| northern California woods to build further community.
| thom wrote:
| Usenet (IRC channels too) had a sense of _place_ that I think is
| less common in mainstream social media, but still exists to an
| extent in forums, just with a worse interface overall. I remember
| some things fondly (partly because I was a teenager) but I'd
| struggle to say it was superior and certainly no healthier than
| today. I don't remember it being tech-focused or professional,
| unless you only hung out in comp.* and not alt.*. Like, who
| remembers Terry Tickle etc?
| gaws wrote:
| > ... IRC ... had a sense of _place_
|
| IRC is alive and kicking.
| thom wrote:
| IRC is a long way down from its peak both in share of
| attention and relevance, but yes, probably still more alive
| than Usenet, although that still also has many pockets of
| activity.
| cies wrote:
| > Usenet (IRC channels too) had a sense of _place_
|
| Not sure what you mean by this, but they sure were not fully
| clad with ads and tricks to get you to pay for some virtual
| gifts or pro-accounts.
| thom wrote:
| There was plenty of spam, to be fair. What I mean is, I don't
| feel like I inhabit or share a space on Twitter or Facebook
| (or here) with actual humans I feel I know. I did feel that
| in various Usenet groups and IRC channels. There's a kinetic,
| physical quality, an explicit coming-together, like having
| your favourite, regular table at a pub, compared to standing
| on a busy street screaming at anonymous strangers. But tbh I
| don't really seek _out_ those niches now, and presumably they
| exist.
| wishfish wrote:
| I enjoy Twitter but I agree with your assessment. Disagree
| a little about Facebook though. No argument about FB the
| company being soulless, evil, etc. But FB groups can be a
| great experience. Especially the smaller ones focused on a
| niche subject. Those are some nice communities, but it can
| take a while to find the right ones.
|
| You're correct about the niches existing. There are little
| corners of the internet that exist as the neighborhood pub.
| Not just small FB groups and Discord channels. But I also
| know blogs still going strong with their 200-1000 regular
| commentators. The only problem is the audience for those
| blogs is aging. Not exactly a problem for me since I'm
| aging too. But does make me a little sad for their
| longevity because they have a problem attracting new users.
| thom wrote:
| I think the closest I've seen is Twitch chat communities,
| but obviously that's a very different dynamic overall. I
| agree with your last point, I am older now, have a
| company and a family, and I don't really have the same
| emotional needs as teenage me. I just don't go looking
| for that level of commitment to internet spaces now. I'm
| sure in 25 years people will be on here lamenting that
| Floogleblarg neural pools don't capture the same vibe as
| Twitch chat circa 2020.
| chromaton wrote:
| I think signature lines on the posts helped with that.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| I think different projects are now active in different places
| depending on the whims of that project. They might have their own
| forum like https://discuss.rubyonrails.org/, or they might be
| active on discord, or reddit, or they might just discuss
| everything on github, or mailing lists.
|
| Back in the usenet days there was really only one place to host
| discussions, and that was usenet. But now there are lots of
| places. I guess this makes it harder to find, and makes it harder
| to jump from community to community.
|
| Reddit is probably the closest thing. And I wouldn't judge all
| subreddits by the "front page" subreddits. I think the ruby and
| emacs subs are good.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Reddit is in theory the same.. but it also is loaded with spam,
| in the form of ads paid to reddit. This is worse.
|
| Compare: FPGA group on USENET, very little spam:
| https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch.fpga
|
| Reddit, full page animated old-spice ads:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/
|
| Also as much as you dislike google groups, just compare the UI of
| the above two.. ugh.. of course there is old reddit:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/FPGA/
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > full page animated old-spice ads
|
| This is what ad blockers are for. I don't see any ads on
| reddit.
| snapetom wrote:
| Except that the majority of content there are posted from
| karma-farming bot aggregators. Reddit does the same thing
| digg did that got them killed - curate submissions, but they
| wisely didn't announce it. Reddit uses a combo of algos,
| mods, and other bots to promote this curated content and bury
| unwanted content on frontpage subs.
|
| Ad blockers unfortunately don't work on those.
| patcon wrote:
| Hard to participate as an English-speaker, but just to scope out
| a still-thriving BBS: students at the local university maintain a
| telnet BBS called PTT, which is essentially the Reddit of Taiwan.
| As I understand, it's been crucial in recent political movements
| (like the Sunflower movements and parliamentary occupation) and
| lost of current events in Taiwan:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > generally quite professional
|
| It most certainly was not.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| There's still vBulletin/phpBB places out there. I spend a lot of
| time on Dragon Mount discussing Wheel of Time, or Lakers Ground
| talking about the LA Lakers. Physics Forums has always pretty
| good for any kind of academic discussion, not just physics.
|
| The problem is discoverability. How would I find these places
| today if I hadn't already found them in 2001? I have no idea.
|
| Unfortunately, the solution is also discoverability. Likely the
| biggest reason I still find these places satisfying is they're
| niche sites full of long-time contributors who know each other
| that have never become popular and never had eternal September
| happen because they're hard to find.
| abruzzi wrote:
| I never thought of usenet as tech focused. There were many areas
| that were non-tech topics. Sure there was comp.sys. _, but all
| the alt._ boards and others. Web forums were kind of the spirtual
| successor, and many of them have subject subforums, but within
| that most web forums segregate discussion by thread. I find that
| much more useful since usenet felt like a mailing list of post
| after post after post. Threads allow me to ignore discussion that
| aren 't relevant to me.
|
| I haven't migrated from web foums to reddit or facebook groups
| though I'm sure there is much information in those places. I
| prefer that independent web forums introduce some friction to
| participating. You have to create an account, and some forums
| have limits for new members until they reach a certain post
| count. While the friction is small that does seem to discourage
| bad behavior a little.
|
| I have easily found forums for subjects I'm interested in, but
| none of them are tech, so I don't know whether you'll find web
| forums on current tech subjects.
| CTmystery wrote:
| > HN is topic-focused, rather than subject-focused
|
| Can you explain what you mean by this?
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| Not the OP, but I'll take a stab at it:
|
| On HN, each thread is about a specific topic, and rarely has
| any direct connection to or overlap with to any other
| thread/topic,
|
| A subject-oriented forum, by contrast, is (supposed to be)
| about a general subject, such as a programming language or
| financial advice, all the posted topics are common to the one
| subject.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| There are some BBS based mail networks, but they are hyper
| specific to retro stuff I believe.
|
| Based on your description of Usenet I think what you miss is the
| context around Usenet (exact period of life, young/single/student
| for example) and not the Usenet itself. You can find plenty of
| places where there are forum like discussions, but it won't be
| the same without the context.
| [deleted]
| DonHopkins wrote:
| So somebody just needs to spin up 3 million dang-bots to
| moderate them. Is dang containerized yet?
| noasaservice wrote:
| Oof, that, past the docker analogy, has some VERY macabre
| other meanings.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
|
| _MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map /Acevedo), also known as Miguel,
| is the earliest executable image of a human brain._
| tonyg wrote:
| https://www.ida.liu.se/~tompe44/lsff-
| book/Vernor%20Vinge%20-...
| heckyeahs wrote:
| 4chan
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| not like this
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| I don't see it mentioned yet that there are some still active,
| moderated Usenet groups, such as misc.legal.moderated and
| misc.taxes.moderated, which don't include spam.
|
| Back in the day, even some unmoderated groups were mostly self-
| moderated, such as the comp.*.oracle and comp.*.perl newsgroups.
| What spam there was, was posted by humans, not bots, and was
| quickly ignored to oblivion.
| rsync wrote:
| It's clearly reddit.
|
| ... which is not to say I love reddit or believe it has the same
| aesthetic as usenet, etc. ... but it's reddit.
| nope96 wrote:
| I miss the local BBS's more. But in Chicago there were chi.*
| Usenet groups which where interesting as well. (They're still
| active... barely) Reddit has /r/chicago but it's not the same
| feel.
|
| NextDoor sounds like something I don't want to check out (What
| happened to EveryBlock?) I'm not on Facebook, maybe there's some
| good local conversation happening there. . .? I'm surprised
| nothing has come close to BBS's yet in terms of meeting locals.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| This is a strangely rose-tinted view of Usenet. Usenet was a mess
| well before Eternal September. You can't talk about Usenet
| without talking about alt.*
|
| After alt.* was inagurated, the very first group was (IIRC)
| alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork. Then there were
| alt.destroy.the.earth and alt.pave.the.earth, which were bitter
| enemies despite their opposition to alt.save.the.earth, because
| if you destroyed the earth there'd be nothing left to pave. Alt
| was also the home of the Big Seven sex groups, plus piracy in the
| alt.binaries groups. The talk.* groups had problems as well. Oh,
| and then there was alt.2600, which purposely had a moderator who
| rejected any and all postings: you had to hack USENET and assume
| moderator privileges to post there.
|
| I think easily the closest thing we have nowadays to USENET is
| reddit. And, to be honest, if you average over its entire
| audience, it's more tame than USENET was.
| spc476 wrote:
| alt.hackers was another moderated group, but it had no
| moderator.
| not2b wrote:
| You do not recall correctly, not even close.
|
| See https://www.livinginternet.com/u/ui_alt.htm
|
| (and I knew Brian Reid and John Gilmore in those days).
| goatcode wrote:
| >[redd]it's more tame than USENET was
|
| Of course it is, it's beholden to advertisers. Chairman Pao saw
| to its taming, right before getting canned.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Don't forget alt.chrome.the.moon and
| alt.sexy.french.captain.borg.borg.borg!
| svachalek wrote:
| Yep, having been around for Usenet I don't find Reddit all that
| different. The main difference is the moderators I guess. But
| for all the stodgy work related groups on Usenet it was the
| alt.* groups that caught fire. Reddit is much the same, there
| are subs for all kinds of serious moderated technical
| discussion still. Those aren't the popular parts but they
| weren't popular on Usenet either.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| I think the difference is, back in usenet times the weirdos
| were also technical professionals. There wasn't the same need
| to be concerned for professional reputation so you'd get things
| like diatribes for fringe political beliefs strewn in among
| deep technical discussions. I used to lurk in alt.fan.warlord
| and watch Bram Moolenaar make fun of people's ascii pic
| signatures. It was a mess, but a technically informed mess,
| which somehow made it more interesting.
| jandrese wrote:
| > Oh, and then there was alt.2600, which purposely had a
| moderator who rejected any and all postings: you had to hack
| USENET and assume moderator privileges to post there.
|
| This is the kind of internet we lost when it went all
| corporate.
| throwaway892238 wrote:
| Defacing websites with crude messages and garish colors was
| the internet's graffiti. Ascii and Demoscene was its street
| art. Zines and hacker radio were the warehouse art shows. We
| have all these documentaries about punk music, but so few
| about punk computing.
| civilized wrote:
| For the last couple years I've wondered if people would like
| something that combined the sleek, text-focused front end of HN
| with the ability to make subreddit-like moderated communities.
|
| The "boringness" of the front end would keep the riff-raff out -
| why would they bother when Reddit et al give them a much bigger
| and more meme-addled audience - and it'd be more like the second
| coming of old-school Usenet that so many older techies seem to
| long for.
|
| If only I were a software engineer rather than a data scientist.
| [deleted]
| woofcat wrote:
| I think a lot of people feel the same way however you need a
| critical mass of users. I'm just presuming I'm younger than you
| however I miss the old days of discussion forums, you'd have some
| for web comics, anime, TV shows all with their set of screen
| names that you learned and inside jokes that lived on. Along with
| this is my love of IRC (which I'm still idling in)
|
| Now with the internet feeling like it's just Reddit, Facebook,
| Google, Discord, LinkedIn, and Pintrest a lot of the fun inside
| jokes have gone to die, and the groups are so large that no-one
| even looks at a username.
| niek_pas wrote:
| > Now with the internet feeling like it's just Reddit,
| Facebook, Google, Discord, LinkedIn, and Pintrest a lot of the
| fun inside jokes have gone to die, and the groups are so large
| that no-one even looks at a username.
|
| I've found that niche subreddits are the exception to this
| rule.
| beebmam wrote:
| As an experiment, I'd love to see a forum which required all
| users to use their real identities, where identities for user
| accounts must be legally verified through an accredited notary
| service, similar to E-Verify/I-9 verification.
|
| I'm curious how much less toxic behavior on a platform like that
| would be.
| foodstances wrote:
| Nextdoor requires address verification and your real name on
| posts, and you are only talking to people within your
| block/neighborhood. There are still constant arguments and bad
| behavior on it. People are just not afraid to be assholes
| online or in person anymore...
| Evenjos wrote:
| I'm in a community like this, which is also very heavily
| moderated.
|
| It still has toxic elements because the people who run the
| platform think a certain way.
| slightwinder wrote:
| So, like Facebook? Twitter? Or any other social network.
|
| Ok, they are not notary certified identities, but bit's pretty
| common and depending on the platform also demanded and
| enforced, with enough people following the demand. But I don't
| get the impression it made the platforms a better place.
|
| People only learned to better hide their tracks, or don't care
| about it.
| beebmam wrote:
| What? Facebook/Twitter and others do not require Notary-
| verified identification.
| slightwinder wrote:
| Yes, as I wrote they don't require notary-verification, but
| they still have verifications and some demand usage of real
| names. Most platforms even have verified accounts for
| somewhat important people. My point is, a notary alone
| would change nothing. People already use their real
| identity, and they are still toxic.
|
| But, it of course would have an effect, for the simple
| reason that the expensive and long verification will filter
| out many casual users, so your user base is smaller and
| more dedicated from the beginning. But for this, you can
| also just open a commercial forum, maybe even with a fee
| for posting. That would probably have far more impact on
| the quality than any identity-check. I remember the
| Something Awful-Site seems to fare quite successful with
| that approach.
| ardit33 wrote:
| Blind.... but it is geared towards the workplace, and not tech
| and gadgets in general. It has more unfiltered conversations, as
| people do speak their mind a bit more. (some eggregious ones, do
| get flagged/removed though).
| dontbenebby wrote:
| tonguez wrote:
| joshstrange wrote:
| > Arguably, Reddit fills some of this niche, but Usenet was tech-
| focused, generally quite professional and frankly didn't have the
| same clientele as Reddit does.
|
| It all depends on the community you want to hang out in. Usenet
| was tech-focused because the only people who knew about it or had
| access were tech-focused and the community was smaller (see:
| Eternal September).
|
| One of your best options are niche, smaller or heavily moderated
| reddit communities or web forums that share the same
| characteristics.
| ginjas wrote:
| Cool kids these days are using Urbit. It has the same style (p2p)
| and has a niche but active community of people interested in all
| kinds of areas, mainly tech, politics, aesthetics, etc.
|
| If you find it 'gimmicky' which I don't, but lots do, just focus
| on the 'Groups' app.
|
| https://urbit.org/getting-started
|
| To communicate you need a 'ship' (an ID). This could be a free
| 'comet' and a paid planet. Layer 2 Planets are relatively cheap,
| and they'll be yours forever too, so it's just a one time
| payment.
|
| You can find them here:
|
| https://subject.network/buy/
|
| https://azimuth.shop/ (3.5 bucks atm in this one)
|
| https://wexpert.systems/
|
| https://mocbel.house/
|
| Any questions, lmk. (not affiliated, just a fan)
| sph wrote:
| > Cool kids these days are using Urbit
|
| I still haven't dived into it, it felt obscure and obtuse last
| time I checked, but are the cool kids actually using it? I.e.
| do you have any more link to this niche community, to check
| what's the status of the project?
| krapp wrote:
| No. The cool kids aren't even aware Usenet exists, the nerds
| are using Mastodon, the turbonerds are using Freenet, and the
| hypernerds wrote their own protocol and only shared it with
| like twelve of their friends and they have a blood pact
| between them to never post it to HN.
| ginjas wrote:
| Don't worry about the 'obscure' aspect. That's part of the
| aesthetic imo. Just install it, boot up a comment and go to
| this group:
|
| ~bitbet-bolbel/urbit-community
|
| Justin Murphy also has a pretty cool guide here:
| https://imperceptible.computer/
|
| You could boot a comet and message me (~piclyx-docsun) there
| with your HN name and I'll link you cool groups I'm in.
|
| What I find weird about Urbit is that it isn't mainstream,
| but most groups I'm in are pretty active. The UI also adds to
| the experience, it is soothing.
|
| Would be happy to show you more stuff.
|
| Edit:
|
| To answer the status, you could check the blog
| (https://urbit.org/blog) or you could join the network and
| follow the beginner groups (i.e. ~bitbet-bolbel/urbit-
| community).
| NoGravitas wrote:
| No one is using Urbit. Stop trying to make Urbit happen. It's
| not going to happen.
| sph wrote:
| The fun police has arrived.
|
| Who exactly are you to stop people from enjoying something
| impractical and controversial? Accept the fact that some
| might have a more open and curious mind.
| noasaservice wrote:
| sph wrote:
| We're talking about technology here, not your opinion of the
| author or their politics.
|
| --
|
| "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic
| tangents."
|
| "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological
| battle. It tramples curiosity."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| noasaservice wrote:
| I _am_ talking about the technology.
|
| Yarvin's own writings indicate that Urbit was written to be
| that of a medieval castle, limited landed ownership (with
| 2^32 stars) with the intent that new people would have to
| buy from these star-landlords. Those "political views" were
| encoded into the basis of Urbit at the deepest
| architectural levels.
|
| So again, saying to avoid "flamebait" is just a distractor
| from discussing the real issues with Urbit itself. The
| "politics and technology" are one in the same.
| sph wrote:
| > Yarvin's own writings indicate that Urbit was written
| to be that of a medieval castle, limited landed ownership
| (with 2^32 stars) with the intent that new people would
| have to buy from these star-landlords.
|
| None of this fits the fascist political ideology.
|
| Let us discuss the merits and cons of a technology that
| promotes artificial scarcity ( _cough_ IPv4 _cough_ ).
| It's an interesting topic, but it's not what you were
| doing with your previous comment and you know that.
| noasaservice wrote:
| Fine. Then perhaps a traditional journal article is more
| your liking: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.117
| 7/02632764219994...
|
| "It is difficult to know how best to approach this
| material analytically. As Gilroy (2019: 3) suggests, when
| discussing fascist ideas 'there is always a danger that
| critics end up taking them more seriously than their
| adherents do'. It is also the case that much of the
| material with which we need to engage is located online
| and often in a form outwith the usual protocols and
| stylistics of the academy. The NRx political project is
| essentially 'anti-egalitarian', 'anti-progressive', and
| argues that 'democracy is bust; rule by the people
| doesn't work, and doesn't lead to good governance' (Gray,
| 2017)."
|
| I'm also looking at Francis Tseng, lead independent
| researcher of the Jain family Institute
| http://distributedweb.care/posts/who-owns-the-stars/
|
| "However, given that Yarvin basically laid out the
| general design for Urbit independently, as he worked on
| it alone for 11 years and in parallel with his political
| writings, and that Urbit, as a P2P project, is a
| fundamentally social and thus incorporates ideas about
| how people should be organized, Yarvin's politics should
| be considered as something that influences his design
| decisions and his long-term vision for the project. Dog-
| whistles have been identified in some of his writing
| about Urbit and its design, including his leaning on Nazi
| philosopher Carl Schmitt for questions around Urbit's
| governance."
|
| Again, I'd argue that you're attacking a "decorum"
| argument, and not the actual content at hand.
| nyolfen wrote:
| if you want an example of feudal property relations, look
| at facebook, twitter, or hn -- the landlord owns
| everything, we just borrow an account that they
| ultimately control. urbit allows you to own an identity
| that can never be taken from you.
|
| >(with 2^32 stars)
|
| the point of finite identities is to create cost and
| deter spam/bad actors, it's not in anybody's interest to
| artificially prevent some set of humans from using the
| network. see here https://urbit.org/faq#more-planets
| ginjas wrote:
| ginjas wrote:
| Also, you'll notice this is my first comment and you'll think
| I'm shilling, which is understandable. I felt the need to
| comment cuz I felt the same way. I was tired of reddit and
| discord groups. I guess the quality of the content wasn't
| enough. In the urbit groups you'll find people who (imo) like
| heterodoxy and 'different' things.
| the_biot wrote:
| > If I remember my computing history correctly, Google ended up
| acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google Groups.
|
| Usenet was a distributed set of news peering relationships,
| exchanging posts via NNTP. There was nothing to acquire, so
| that's not what happened.
|
| Google merely set up a web interface to it, which was eventually
| extended to the abomination that was Google Groups. This was
| intended to be some sort of mix of Usenet group and mailing list,
| all via a web interface. In reality it was awful and I suspect
| development on it stopped 10+ years ago.
| jghn wrote:
| Dejanews built that frontend on top of an archive they had.
| Google bought Dejanews and thus the archive.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Google really destroyed that archive, there's posts from the
| 80s and 90s I know used to be in deja and in early google
| that just can't be found any more.
| btrettel wrote:
| And it seems that a lot of uuencoded content was removed at
| some point. You can see the text of the message, but the
| uuencoded part is mostly cut out. Here's an example:
| https://groups.google.com/g/misc.int-
| property/c/f2-dV5wVP9U/...
|
| If anyone here knows how to get the uuencoded part of that
| message, I'd be interested.
| that_courtney wrote:
| You can't. It was never there.
|
| I wrote the first custom NNTP client for Deja. (This was
| a high-performance replacement for the community, open
| source client.) All it did was receive and dump articles
| in a format for the indexer. It did some light
| processing, including stripping uuencode content. So
| uuencode never even made it into the archive.
| btrettel wrote:
| Thanks for the information. I figured someone here might
| know something.
| squarefoot wrote:
| The final nail in Usenet's coffin was the removal of the
| discussion filter from Google searches in 2014. Before
| that, people could use that filter to easily find others
| talking about something, but apparently that didn't please
| advertisers who wanted users to find only companies
| _selling_ that something, so Google removed that filter and
| problem solved.
|
| https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discussion-search-
| dead-1...
|
| https://browsermedia.agency/blog/google-kills-discussion-
| sea...
| jghn wrote:
| To be honest a lot of what I posted back then I'm happy has
| been lost to the sands of time.
|
| I will say one thing I've found strange is how spotty old
| posts are. Even within the same newsgroup. I can easily
| track down old posts of mine but sometimes stuff is spotty
| within a single thread. I've not seen any true rhyme or
| reason to what's gone and what remains.
| quokka wrote:
| Agreed. I posted a lot in the 90s, especially to groups
| like sci.math and rec.arts.books.tolkien, and there is
| almost no trace of any of it in Google groups.
|
| When Google bought the Dejanews archives I thought it was
| good, because Google was good at search and I naively still
| believed that the company actually wanted to make all
| information accessible. It's a real shame that all of the
| old Usenet stuff is gone.
| mh- wrote:
| Google acquired DejaNews, which was a popular web interface for
| reading Usenet. They rebranded it into Groups at some point.
|
| But what is called Groups now is something else entirely, as
| you said.
| easrng wrote:
| Google Groups still has usenet support, I used it the other
| day trying to track down the source of an old story.
| derefr wrote:
| > The abomination that was Google Groups
|
| FYI, Google Groups are literally the "groups" of Google
| Workspace -- every time you create a group of users to e.g.
| assign that group some GCP roles, that group then also gets an
| email address (that being the group's global primary key), and
| that email address then implicitly becomes a mailing list all
| group members are subscribed to.
|
| It's actually very useful in a corporate Google Workspace
| context -- it's rare to need an actual mailing list given Slack
| et al, but they're effectively "group email-forwarding
| aliases", allowing messages to e.g. devops-billing@example.com
| to arrive in the inboxes of multiple people.
| arccy wrote:
| the fact that it's a mailing list is so much better than a
| plain forwarding alias: it's a searchable/shareable archive
| for people who joined later. No more asking a coworker to dig
| through their emails for some important information
| fweimer wrote:
| The gateway between Google Groups and certain newsgroups is
| still running, in both directions. For example, I received a
| copy of this Groups posting
| https://groups.google.com/g/de.soc.recht.steuern+buchfuehrun...
| over regular Usenet NNTP.
|
| The technology is still up and running. Some of the people from
| the 90s are still there. But Usenet definitely has peaked in
| terms of users and postings.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| I think what you miss is the time when only the intelligent and
| sensible <10% of the population are on-line. There was no social
| network, so Usenet was where the cool kids hanged out. Now that
| everyone is on-line, and dragged 99% of the intelligent and
| sensible people over to social networks, so the remaining 0.1% of
| the population is not large enough to make Usenet interesting any
| more.
| Razengan wrote:
| I really miss having a NATIVE app to access content from
| different communities in a standard format.
|
| Along with the IRC Comic Chat in Windows 98 :')
| tzs wrote:
| I'm disappointed that NNTP servers and clients didn't get wider
| use outside of Usenet.
|
| Most public forums back in the day would have been vastly
| improved if they had been done as an NNTP server with each sub-
| forum as a newsgroup rather than doing them with something like
| phpBBB on an HTTP server.
|
| Heck, most forums _today_ would have better threading and post
| organization with NNTP than they do with the popular web forum
| systems.
|
| Same goes for non-chat communication within companies. Newsgroups
| on an internal NNTP server would be better in most ways than
| mailing lists for topics in which people actually need to discuss
| things as a group.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Back in the late 90s I had some forum software which would sync
| with NNTP, either posting from the forum into NNTP and vice
| versa.
|
| I ran it, and linked it to a new group. Nobody ever posted in
| usenet, and I suspect nobody read in there.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Heck, most forums today would have better threading and post
| organization with NNTP than they do with the popular web forum
| systems.
|
| I beg to differ.
|
| NNTP's lack of moderation is a bug, not a feature. Between the
| spam and abuse, NNTP would be an utter cesspool in today's
| world.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > NNTP would be an utter cesspool
|
| I've seen Usenet, and I've seen Reddit. I'll take Usenet.
| tzs wrote:
| NNTP can be moderated.
| agiacalone wrote:
| Gibson Research (GRC) still runs an active news server, I
| believe.
|
| nntp://news.grc.com
|
| I also worked for a place in the early 2000s which used an NNTP
| server internally (large corp) for company communication and
| discussion.
| midislack wrote:
| People still use Usenet, it's still going. Some groups get
| hundreds of ppd still.
| zafiro17 wrote:
| Comp.misc for computer stuff Misc.news.internet.discuss for
| oddball Sci.misc for science
|
| These are three decent groups for content similar to HN.
|
| If you need a usenet provider, try solani.org (no cost) or
| individual.net (paid but excellent)
|
| For clients, any *nix install will have slrn, tin, pan, or
| possibly knode. Thunderbird is on mac and windows as well as
| BSD/Linux.
| ms123 wrote:
| You're welcome to have a virtual drink on https://midnight.pub :)
| nootropicat wrote:
| The forum/mailing list format is over, most good discussions
| happen on discord now (some people swear by telegram - mostly
| Russians).
|
| I'm not claiming it's a change for the better. I'm old enough to
| have caught the tail end of phpBB forums about every niche so I
| know what was lost. From a technical perspective forums are
| superior for long term discussions (especially for non-members!),
| but in terms where new stuff happens and where community forms -
| it's over. The closest replacement are specific channels on
| discord that allow sometimes for week-long discussions.
|
| One of main social effects I see is that knowledge starts to get
| siloed. There are many technical details that exist online only
| on specific chats, which aren't google searchable. The main
| negative is that if you don't even know where to look or ask,
| it's way harder to figure out anything. There's also a positive:
| because people are forced to join they are more likely to
| contribute. In fact I have observed this in myself: often I only
| join some discord to look for one thing, but I just leave the
| server on afterwards. In many cases I see something worth
| responding to and morph from an observer into an active
| participant. This would never have happened on a forum. It's
| possible this factor is solely responsible for the current
| dominance of discord/telegram.
|
| One future shift I can see is a move away from chats into VR. I
| don't think it's going to happen with zoomers, but alpha gen -
| assuming they grow up in VR spaces may find it natural to prefer
| literal talking as anime and furry avatars, with (almost) full
| nonverbal communication, instead of writing text messages to each
| other. In a way, it would be a return to the historical norm of
| human communication.
|
| From a social trend perspective it's the same direction as the
| move away from forums into chats: worse information search
| (basically gone with VR). More emphasis on contributing and on
| personal relationships. The main disadvantage I can see is that
| it's going to place much stronger emphasis on people's
| characteristics: age, gender, native language.
| eanc wrote:
| I hate chats so much. Having to ask something manually and then
| wait and hope for minutes/hours/days for a manual reply, I
| can't think of something more opposed to what people who are
| familiar with what computers can do for humanity should
| recognize the value in, and yet here we all are.
| nootropicat wrote:
| On the balance I like chats much more. In terms of personal
| connections per time spent on contributing I found chats to
| be about one order of magnitude more effective than old
| (gone) phpbb forums. Forums were much more transactional and
| impersonal in nature.
|
| Compared to what forums morphed into - reddit, hn, similar -
| these are another order of magnitude worse than old forums.
| See, consider yours and my reply. I won't remember your
| nickname nor will you remember mine. There are no avatars.
| It's borderline machine level information exchange with the
| author itself a faded out barely visible string.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| Trivia: one of the first newsreaders that helped make Usenet
| popular in the 1980s was _rn_ [0], written by Larry Wall, the
| same fellow who created Perl.
|
| [0]It was one of the first newsreaders to take full advantage of
| character-addressable CRT terminals [Wikipedia]
| jll29 wrote:
| The OP resonates with me, and I feel like firing up M-x gnus
| again to browse the likes of comp.ai.nat-lang, comp.compilers,
| comp.std.c and alt.fan.montypython.
|
| Perhaps it's time for a new USENET group, comp.misc.hn? I'd much
| prefer to read HN in a TUI with keyboard navigation than from a
| Web browser.
| mprime1 wrote:
| This may help to quench your nostalgia
| https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84
| sponaugle wrote:
| The question is - What are you missing? I suspect you probably
| miss something that has more to do with the participants.
|
| In the early days of Usenet there were very few ways to access it
| from the perspective of an average person. You either had to be
| working on one of the small number of companies that were
| internet connected or were at a university. That significantly
| restricted the available pool of people using it, and also
| filtered that pool.
|
| Up through the early 90s that natural filter mechanism kept the
| focus of individual groups small, reduced noise, and increased
| signal. Over time as internet access became more widespread that
| signal to noise decreased, and most modern forums still have
| difficulty with it.
|
| There are a few other interesting characteristics - the specific
| nature of the tree approach and the availability of lots of
| specific groups gave it some uniqueness - Today you might see a
| bit of that in Reddit subs, Facebook groups, and other similar
| platforms, albeit lacking the tree.
| bartread wrote:
| You mention the filter effect: I think what really killed
| Usenet, at least for me, was spam, much of which was automated,
| with no great mechanism in place to combat it.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| These days you could fight spam simply by adding a proof-of-
| work requirement for posting content to the network. Isn't
| that exactly what this Web3/Blockchain fad is all about
| anyway?
| simcop2387 wrote:
| That's been attempted for email too, not sure how far it
| ever went. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
| pitched wrote:
| This is a really interesting use-case. I don't think
| posting spam is really a zero-cost thing though. So we
| wouldn't be adding a cost, we would be increasing it. So I
| guess the big question is, how much can we charge per post
| that spammers couldn't afford but wouldn't scare away
| actual community members?
| codethief wrote:
| Wouldn't proof of stake be much more promising?
|
| 1) Start off with a trusted group of people
| (stakeholders)
|
| 2) Set up an invite-only system
|
| 3) Inviting someone means sharing some stake (i.e. some
| reputation) with them
|
| 4) To post you need some minimum amount of stake
|
| 5) With every post that's not downvoted into oblivion you
| increase your stake until you reach a certain equilibrium
| point. (So there's a limit and it's not about gaining
| status points.)
|
| 6) Posts that are downvoted into oblivion will cause
| their authors to lose some stake.
| bartread wrote:
| I think making a non-free Usenet is pretty much anathema
| to the whole concept of Usenet.
| gknoy wrote:
| I wouldn't want to pay Real Money for it, but somehow it
| doesn't seem the same to say "I'll spend some finite
| amount of computation time/energy to make this comment".
| That seems like a much lower hurdle.
|
| At the same time, paying ten cents to make a comment on
| Reddit or HN is very unappealing.
| v64 wrote:
| This was in fact one of the earliest use cases of proof-of-
| work from the 90s [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
| saba2008 wrote:
| >These days
|
| HashCash is older than Bitcoin, and Bitcoin sybil-attack
| protection is basically HashCash.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > What are you missing?
|
| Early Usenet was like Reddit, without the corporate (and come
| on, blatantly left-leaning) censorship.
| InefficientRed wrote:
| Piggy-backing off of this post: the answer is to get _off_ the
| high-trafficked parts of the public internet. Examples:
|
| 1. Meatspace user groups / interest groups.
|
| 2. University lecture series (the type of weekly seminar that
| all graduate students and faculty in a given research area
| attend). You can usually attend as a member of the public if
| you have an "in".
|
| 3. Mailing lists and discord servers for specific projects.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| "Moving Castles" was the terminology I heard someone
| propose[0].
|
| Unfortunately they got too caught up in the crypto nonsense
| but the idea was sound - good communities have to be guarded
| and they occasionally "lower the drawbridge" to bring on
| newcomers, potentially with semi-public spaces. This could be
| a minecraft server, a facebook group or what have you.
|
| Since the group is motile, they aren't affected by platforms
| being subpar. They can avoid stagnation by bringing in
| newcomers, but have a way to vet incoming people too before
| allowing them "internal" access.
|
| [0]: https://trust.support/feed/moving-castles
| sillyquiet wrote:
| Yeah exactly. Usenet wasn't what it was because of the
| technology, it was because the participants were mostly there
| to have 'professional' conversations, and the kinds of
| conversations that nerdy techie-minded people have over beers
| after work (wesley.crusher.die.die.die, etc).
| sbf501 wrote:
| As another Member of the Society to Reduce Wesley into a
| Little Styrofoam Dodecahedron, I can certainly attest that
| usenet wasn't as gleamingly professional as we remember. The
| original stereotypes of discussion group users (trolls, white
| knights, etc.) came from usenet.
| chasd00 wrote:
| don't forget porn, there was a tremendous amount of porn on
| usenet. a friend of mine had some perl script he called
| "aub" that scraped alt.user.binaries or something like
| that. catalogs and catalogs of stuff on a quiet little
| server in a university lab.
| jandrese wrote:
| The thing I miss most was having one single newsreader
| interface that I could configure as I liked. With web forums
| everybody has their own idea of how things should work and I
| end up having to remember a dozen different flavors of
| "markdown" and ways of filtering users or threading posts. The
| Usenet had issues, chiefly the lack of a good way to moderate
| channels, but I wish we had gone with an open data model
| instead of the countless walled gardens that sprang up in its
| place.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Maybe matrix and/or mastodon?
| jandrese wrote:
| I thought Matrix was more of an IRC replacement than a new
| Usenet. Mastadon always seemed to want to be Twitter.
| sponaugle wrote:
| Yea, that is something I too can appreciate. The simplicity
| of having a single place where I can read about a wide
| arrangement of hobbies, interests, and professions.
| xtracto wrote:
| Not OP but the thing I miss the most from Usenet and IRC is the
| fact that they were client agnostic. I hate the discord client.
| I hate the reddit client and the facebook. I'd love to be able
| to have an open source desktop based client that I can modify
| and implement all sorts of plugins for it. I hate that we moved
| from services/protocols to closed vertical monolith.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I'm guessing they have limited functionality, but Pidgin is
| free software and has both discord and Facebook plugins.
| They've certainly made it difficult for the free software
| clients, but people continue trying to maintain this ideal.
| beezle wrote:
| From late 1990 until around 1997 I had a full feed via UUNET
| and ran cnews locally on my pc with cnews and trn for reading.
| It wasn't long before I had to scale back and drop all the
| binary groups and eventually others. IIRC a full feed when I
| started was about 3MB a day (still tough to do at 12/2400 bps)
| Maursault wrote:
| I had a Usenet portal subscription between 2005-2008. I ran
| Thoth (usenet client) on Ubuntu on old Mac G4 towers. At the
| time, the connection speed blew away torrents.
| zanethomas wrote:
| usenet still exists see: supernews
| bdcravens wrote:
| Reddit. Most know the reputation that the largest subreddits
| have, but if you drill down past those troll-targets, you'll find
| very specialized subreddits that have very focused conversation.
| cpach wrote:
| I'll take the liberty to re-post what I wrote in a similar
| thread:
|
| _It can be quite difficult to find online oases [...]. HN is
| quite unique. Have you considered starting your own Slack, invite
| interesting people and build a new oasis? (Or Matrix channel.) It
| would take some work to get people to join, but it's not
| impossible._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582270
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| I sure miss all the crazy fun at alt.devilbunnies back in the day
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Usenet is a spam-riddled cesspool, the only advantage it has over
| Reddit is that it is technically more open and it doesn't annoy
| you with its mobile app. I heard stories that it was better
| before eternal September, but I wasn't there, maybe some
| greybeards can comment on that.
|
| And sure, some newsgroups stayed good, but the same can be said
| of Reddit. Some subreddits are very nice and technical, others
| are terrible.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google
| Groups._
|
| That is false and nonsensical. Usenet is a federated network of
| NNTP servers; Google just joined that with their own
| implementation having an awful web front end, which they
| proceeded to revise in even worse directions. That happened right
| in the middle of a decline that was happening, driven by ISPs
| shutting down their NNTP servers. So it might have looked like
| Usenet is somehow transitioning to Google. Google did also
| acquire a Usenet archive, and then make it impossible to use.
|
| Anhyway, Usenet is alive and (sort of) well. There are new posts
| daily in newsgroups like comp.unix.programmer, comp.lang.c. Even
| comp.lang.lisp sees some action.
|
| See you there!
|
| --
|
| Hey look, comp.lang.awk has a new post, from the somewhat kooky,
| but topical, KPop 2GM
|
| --
|
| I'm currently using the news.eternal-september.org NNTP server.
|
| Note: there is spam, but not nearly as much as you see through
| the Google Groups interface, and that's the interface that offers
| no filtering features.
|
| You need a newsreader with killfile processing. I use the
| terminal-based slrn (S-Lang Read News). It has a score feature
| for assigning scores to articles based on matches on arbitrary
| fields. If you give something a -9999 score, it disappears. The
| fields have a lot of information. You can kill based on what
| server someone is coming from, or what client they are supposedly
| using, if you want.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| Something like that?
|
| https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84
| usrn wrote:
| Newsgroups are still there. I still read and post to them as do
| plenty of other people. Your ISP probably doesn't provide a news
| server anymore but there are plenty of free ones for the text
| only groups.
| wvenable wrote:
| You dismiss Reddit pretty quickly but if you want a bulletin
| board-style forum on hyper-specific subjects then it's a good
| option. I'm subscribed to some hyper-specific tech subjects and
| the posts are very professional and helpful.
|
| The other place I've found even more hyper-specific subjects is,
| ironically, Facebook. I, in general, stay off of Facebook but
| when I was looking for details on some very rare hardware, the
| communities there were actually the most active and useful.
|
| You may be lamenting Eternal September and not the loss of Usenet
| itself.
| knaik94 wrote:
| Smaller communities won't be as active, but discord servers have
| been great for talking with like minded people about hyper-
| specific things. The thing I like about discord is that even if
| the main server seems pretty general, they have channels and
| those tend to get much more specific.
|
| It's up to the community how real time it feels. I know some
| servers that have global interest and there's usually someone to
| talk to regardless of when you ask a question. On the other hand
| I have also noticed servers where it's becomes obvious who is on
| EST vs PST.
|
| Google groups hasn't been the main method of communication for a
| while.
|
| There's discords for TV shows and Games, but I also see discord
| for development projects. Some even use patreon and have discord
| access as a subscription benefit where the developer posts beta
| builds.
|
| For example, Uberduck https://uberduck.ai/ has an pretty active
| discord for developers. Uberduck have a free tier when you can
| synthesize TTS that sound like well known voice actors or
| singers. https://app.uberduck.ai/speak#mode=tts-
| reference&voice=cave-... And it has a paid tier if you want to
| clone your own voice.
|
| EleutherAI's discord has a similar healthy discord community.
| GPT-NeoX talk there.
|
| Two Minute Papers , the youtube channel run by Dr.Karoly Zsoln
| has its own unofficial discord as well. Unofficial but Dr. Karoly
| Zsoln has shared a twitter linking to it, so he is aware of it.
|
| Lichess.org has a discord server.
|
| I can't promise if your hyper-specific interests will have
| discord server dedicated to it, but there's many. In fact my
| university has a specific server for CS and Math and you can ask
| for help, and from the last time I checked, specific professors
| do come and answer questions, although more likely it's other
| classmates.
| slightwinder wrote:
| Oh, that's a fascinating wild post.
|
| > Google ended up acquiring and eating Usenet, becoming Google
| Groups.
|
| They did not acquire usenet, they acquired Dejanews, a big
| usenet-archive and gateway to the usenet. Usenet itself is made
| of decentraliced servers. Everyone can have one, most big
| providers and tech-companies had one in the early days. Each with
| their own groups. There also were public groups, maintained by
| some hive-mind-org or something.
|
| Anyway, Usenet still exists, it's not dead, technically. But
| there is also not much alive either. File sharing on commercial
| servers seems to be very popular now, and the discusion-groups
| are receiving more spam than actual worthy content.
|
| > Reddit fills some of this niche, but Usenet was tech-focused,
|
| 50:50 I'd say. There were many tech-groups. But pretty fast there
| were also an equal amount of non-tech-groups. And in terms of
| hyper-focus I would say, reddit has far more focus today than
| usenet ever delivered. It's more about finding a sub and filling
| it.
|
| > generally quite professional and frankly didn't have the same
| clientele as Reddit does.
|
| I get the impression your problem is more about the people, not
| the platform. Yes, usenet had more nerds and expert, more
| technical capable people. But usenet was also significant
| smaller, as was the whole internet at the time. You had some kind
| of natural selection, as internet generally, and usenet
| specifically only lured very specific people in. With special
| interests, from a special age and culture. Today it's different,
| you have anyone from anywhere making a space. I'd say those time
| are lost forever. At best you get some overhomogenized
| communities, like this hackernews here. But if you look at
| reddit, discord, or web-forums in general, you will still find
| hyper-focused spaces. Just not necessarily with the kind of
| people your chemistry matches with.
| 300bps wrote:
| I came from the BBS era before Usenet and I think that would be
| an interesting experiment in social networking today.
|
| Allow regular people to set up a BBS that other people could
| connect to. Once there they can read/post on public message
| boards, they can send direct messages to other users on the
| same BBS, they can exchange files between them, they can play
| multiplayer online games with their friends, engage in group
| chat, etc.
|
| A small percentage of people like running things like this.
| Right now they're probably starting up a Facebook group that
| has draconian content restrictions and extremely limited
| functionality. Make it easy for them to start a BBS - either on
| a SaaS platform or literally hosted on their own device, they
| might just switch to it.
| jtode wrote:
| Hey there, former sysop here, both on a C64 in the late 80s
| and a PC in the early 90s. I've been tossing around the idea
| of starting another one that you ssh to, and make it
| available as a docker image. Would anyone show up? Maybe if I
| make a web interface...
|
| I have left all social media - this site is the only social
| thing I do now - and this whole thread is giving me all kinds
| of sad feels.
| Maursault wrote:
| > I came from the BBS era before Usenet
|
| Unless you were dialing up to CBBS between 1978-1980, i.e.
| the only BBS in the world at the time, then USENET predates
| your BBS era, which I would assume like most is really
| somewhere between 1984-1994, even if BBS existed prior to
| then and after then.
| matt_heimer wrote:
| In practice I think access to BBS systems came before
| Usenet for many of us. I didn't have Usenet access until I
| had internet access (through a BBS). And I didn't have a
| good nntp server until I had a dedicated ISP many years
| after accessing dialup, non-internet BBS systems.
|
| I remember reporting a PINE newsgroup thread bug at the
| height of my nntp usage and several of the local BBS
| systems had started dying off by then.
| rnxrx wrote:
| There were also a number of Usenet <-> FidoNet/echomail
| gateways. This was especially useful for local BBS users
| that weren't affiliated with any university computing
| facilities.
| smcameron wrote:
| The opposite is also true for many, namely, lots of
| university students who were on usenet in the computer
| labs, and maybe had a TRS-80 in the dorm connected to
| nothing.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes, PC-based BBS systems BBS systems were quite
| widespread going back to at least the early eighties.
| (BBSs existed before that but were often pretty primitive
| --e.g. a personal computer with a floppy drive and a 300
| baud modem. You had a sort of parallel version of Usenet
| because in addition to the local BBS you had PCRelay,
| FIDOnet, and possibly other message exchanges between
| systems.
|
| Especially the commercial BBSs could have quite a few
| systems and phone lines and, as you say the bigger BBSs
| often became the first ISP that consumers had access to
| if they didn't have access through their company or
| university.
|
| You also had the big commercial services like Compuserve,
| AOL, Bix, Delphi, and so forth.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| That's true but the BBSes were available to anyone with the
| money for a computer, modem and the phone bill. Usenet and
| the internet was reserved for the chosen few.
|
| So in that sense BBSes would predate Usenet for most
| people.
|
| I got Usenet access before I got full internet (even
| dialup) in fact but it was much later, in the mid 90s,
| using a really expensive UUCP account.
| elzbardico wrote:
| For most people outside universities, BBSes came first for
| all practical purposes.
| shon wrote:
| "Make it easy for them to start a BBS"
|
| You mean, like this?
|
| https://enigma-bbs.github.io/
| commandlinefan wrote:
| That's not really a BBS, though... a BBS was something you
| dialed a phone into. I don't think that in the modern era
| of ubiquitous cell phones, that you really could set up an
| actual BBS.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| > Allow regular people to set up a BBS that other people
| could connect to. Once there they can read/post on public
| message boards, they can send direct messages to other users
| on the same BBS, they can exchange files between them, they
| can play multiplayer online games with their friends, engage
| in group chat, etc.
|
| So, Discord?
| ArtWomb wrote:
| Rhizome has painstakingly documented its forensic archival of
| The Thing BBS
|
| https://thingbbs.rhizome.org/
|
| It's a testament to how de-centralized and randomly those
| archives were served. And the death of dial-up async long
| manifesto culture. Any greenfield cloud based approach can
| scale users, but not that culture of usenet binary harvest
| tools, irc #warez clubs and constrained bandwidth netiquette ;)
| Majromax wrote:
| > I get the impression your problem is more about the people,
| not the platform.
|
| There's one structural difference: Usenet had no engagement
| metric but replies. Modern replacements measure and implicitly
| optimize for view counts (the lurker experience); both Reddit
| and Hacker News sort and surface posts based on a karma
| score/like count.
|
| I think this difference led Usenet to implicitly optimize for
| high-effort posts. The stereotypical Reddit "in-joke" thread
| has no place on Usenet because the principal reward of karma is
| entirely missing. Instead, posters are implicitly rewarded with
| attention when their posts garner replies and discussion.
|
| On one hand, this encourages real content and discussion over
| superficial "updoots to the left". On the other hand, it also
| encourages flamebait and high-effort trolling, which a vote-
| scoring system can silently suppress.
| antiterra wrote:
| > On one hand, this encourages real content and discussion
| over superficial "updoots to the left".
|
| Yeah no, if you go back to the supposed USENET glory days
| you'll find a sense of humor that, to be as charitable as
| possible, is incredibly cringey by today's standards.
|
| People smugly typing stuff like 'Bahagaha ZAP LART!! _plonk_
| Welcome to my kill file, lamer!!!.'
|
| Today you only really run into such bafflingly unfunny stuff
| in the Linux kernel mailing list-- you know, supposedly
| hilarious things like 'Come to the dark side, Sarah. We have
| cookies!'
|
| (You may find a rare exception like a shaggy dog story about
| how a coin flip going differently would result in HP's UNIX,
| HP-UX, being called PH-UX.)
| dkresge wrote:
| What I wouldn't do to be done with (some of) "today's
| standards".
| not2b wrote:
| Just as in modern Reddit, the culture was very different
| from group to group. Some were like that, others were much
| more polite.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >The stereotypical Reddit "in-joke" thread has no place on
| Usenet because the principal reward of karma is entirely
| missing.
|
| Nope. `rec.arts.sf.written` and `alt.folklore.urban`
| immediately come to mind as having _extensive_ in-jokes. The
| phenomenon of replies to a post being almost incomprehensible
| to the uninitiated because they use /rely on the existing
| ecosystem of said in-jokes is as true for such newsgroups as
| it is for any subreddit. The only difference is that on
| Reddit said comments will be at the top of the tree, but the
| metastructure of their replies is otherwise the same.
| jaydeflix wrote:
| omg, what even moderately trafficked group didn't have in-
| jokes? Any community will get in-jokes as it ages. This
| isn't a feature of reddit vs usenet vs Bob's Web Forum
| Software v3, it's a feature of a community.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| Just because there wasn't an explicit upvote/downvote
| mechanism, doesn't mean people weren't posting -- sometimes
| extensively -- for a kind of social cachet. Witness, for
| instance, Kibo [1]
|
| 1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry
|
| _edit_ can't spel.
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| Having never experienced high-effort trolling, I suppose I
| don't really know whether if it's better. My gut reaction is
| that I'd rather have high-effort trolling over low-effort
| trolling though.
| btilly wrote:
| Then you have no idea what it's like to realize that a
| well-known Usenet crank is a real person, lives in the same
| town that you do, is pissed off at you, and is honestly
| crazy.
|
| This happened to me with Archimedes Plutonium back when he
| was Ludwig Von Plutonium. You can find him discussed in
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_personality. (Luckily
| for me, his brand of crazy didn't trend towards violence.
| Though I still regret later having introduced him to the
| p-adic numbers.)
|
| There is probably more aggregate pain over time from
| something like a group of 4chan users coming up with
| Rickrolling then successfully making it a meme. But the
| pain that a high effort troll can cause is
| rather...special.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Everyone can have one, most big providers and tech-companies
| had one in the early days
|
| In the late 90's, when the web started to dominate the
| internet, I was hoping for an NNTP overhaul that would allow
| most people to host mini-NNTP servers for true
| decentralization. Freenet and I2P seem to be sorts of stabs at
| the idea, but never really caught on, unfortunately. I'd love
| to see a truly worldwide Usenet.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > an NNTP overhaul that would allow most people to host mini-
| NNTP servers for true decentralization
|
| That would be quite an idea: extended NNTP over P2P, but
| doesn't Mastodon do sort of a similar thing today?
| Freebytes wrote:
| Does alt.sex.robots fit into tech or non-tech?
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| Depends on the use case :)
| res0nat0r wrote:
| Eh I mean Eternal September has it's own wikipedia page for a
| reason, and Usenet stopped being strictly
| nerd/geek/math/science 30 years ago. The only thing it is
| useful for now is piracy, and everyone else has moved on to
| either Reddit, or hyper specific phpbb type forums, both of
| which just require digging to discover what you like.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
| ghaff wrote:
| Usenet was probably still useful for some time after the
| Eternal September--especially if you mostly stayed out of the
| alt. hierarchy. But it definitely declined as access became
| more widespread.
| [deleted]
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > receiving more spam than actual worthy content.
|
| Let me take a minute to commemorate "Canter & Siegel, green-
| card lawyers", for being the first sharp-eyed critters to spot
| they could make a buck shitting in the common's spring.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| > _maintained by some hive-mind-org or something_
|
| I believe you may be thinking of the backbone cabal[1]. But
| maybe not, since it's secret and doesn't exist.
|
| ---
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal
| chasd00 wrote:
| i bet you could fit all the BGP experts in the world in a
| medium sized conference hall and half of them would be on a
| first name basis with each other. That's what i think of when
| i think of "backbone cabal".
| davidwritesbugs wrote:
| As other commenters have pointed out Usenet was a serious of
| collaborating servers each independently owned & run so there
| was nothign to 'acquire'. What happened, from memory, was that
| a sysop made a backup of his Usenet feed and Google got that
| tape. My GoogleFu is to weak to find a link to the story.
|
| I ran the Newzbin Usenet search engine so it's a topic of some
| nostalgia for me.
| jtode wrote:
| A pleasure to finally meet you lol
| throwaway892238 wrote:
| Thanks for Newzbin! NZBs were a revelation. I had to build a
| RAID array to keep all the crap I downloaded :)
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| So you're the one that killed usenet for filesharing.
| (Binaries being unfriendly to download probably kept the DMCA
| folks at bay. NZBs changed that.)
| s0l1dsnak3123 wrote:
| Thank you for Newzbin, I've used it many times over the
| years!
| not2b wrote:
| The old Usenet had social groups and discussion groups for
| almost every interest you could think of. New groups were
| created multiple times per week, and when the backbone
| maintainers tried to rein that in, the alt hierarchy was
| created and vastly more groups were created. But most of the
| non-tech groups were not archived so that discussion is gone.
| Arguably fortunately: we were young and stupid and posted
| embarrassing stuff using our real names and affiliations.
| billyjobob wrote:
| https://getaether.net/ is an attempt at a modern usenet, i.e.
| decentralised discussion. However it doesn't have many users or
| third party clients.
|
| https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/superhighway84/ is a more directly
| nostalgia inspired clone of usenet.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think people overlook web forums. I would point to
|
| https://coderanch.com/
|
| https://www.dpreview.com/forums
|
| and
|
| https://polyamory.com/
|
| as good examples. There are a lot of dead forums out there, but
| there are also ones where the administrators make the effort to
| greet new users and make them feel welcome. For instance that
| last forum covers a fraught issue where emotions run pretty high
| but the administrators do a good job of "onboarding" new users.
| WR7wh5Un wrote:
| This is true. I have tried to maintain the same type of "great
| people" in my forum. It's a lot of hard work and it's been
| costly to maintain over the years. It is also admittedly very
| limited in focus.
| pupppet wrote:
| ... [166/256] GIANT FILE... [167/256] GIANT FILE... [169/256]
| GIANT FILE... ...
|
| Kids today will never know the pain.
| jandrese wrote:
| That's what parity data was for. There were even clients that
| would seek out all of the binaries that had enough parts for a
| full download and do all of the work for you.
|
| That said, alt.binaries was a big reason that ISPs started
| dropping Usenet. The other being the ever decreasing signal to
| noise ratio as the entire system proved to be vulnerable to
| spam and trolls. Yet another example of why moderation is a
| necessary evil if you want to scale up a discussion group.
| spc476 wrote:
| The solution to that was a perl script called (I think) aub
| (Assemble USENET binaries). I remember back in the 90s, some
| friends and I in college would run that as a cron job to
| accumulate files over time. This was long enough ago that the
| version we ran was Perl 4.
| [deleted]
| chasd00 wrote:
| This is interesting, i know that same script. I thought a
| buddy of mine out of Arlington TX wrote it around '96 or '97.
| I didn't know it existed outside of our autonomous vehicle
| systems lab. We used it to accumulate and categorize certain
| pictures.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| "GIANT FILE" == porn...
|
| How many of us attempted to automate this process :-)
| genpfault wrote:
| Isn't that what parchive[1] and/or RAR recovery volumes were
| for?
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive
| Bostonian wrote:
| Usenet still exists, but some groups are mostly (but not
| entirely) spam, at least when you view them through Google
| Groups, for example comp.lang.python at
| https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.python . It would be great
| if a coordinated effort to mark spam as spam cleaned up
| comp.lang.python. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.fortran
| has less spam, and I regularly flag spam there.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Discord is terrible and wish there wasn't this stupid push to put
| everything into them. Sure you get initial 'ooh I'm part of
| something going on here' feeling but it's just a giant unindexed
| chat that is ephemeral and fleeting. It's a realtime chat -- with
| channels! Big deal. No one tried to use IRC back in the day as a
| forum. Chaotic if need to catch up god forbid you miss something
| from a day ago. It's just so bad and nowhere like forums. A
| symptom of a generation that can only deal with their immediate
| present and has no sense of history and just goes through life
| like that.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Reddit is like that too. You can't "bump" old threads to
| continue discussions.
|
| Ephemeral is a perfect term to describe the new internet.
| fritigern wrote:
| Take a look at https://lemmy.ml/ . It's a federated reddit
| alternative that has a very usenet-like feeling. You can also go
| for one of the other instances (there are some good ones like
| feddit.de and also some really crazy ones).
| dym_sh wrote:
| cool technology, not enough people.
|
| which can be said about usenet too lol
|
| like, even fedi/ration with mastodon &co is not enough to
| overcome pure network effect of twitter and reddit
| fritigern wrote:
| It has been growing fast since the beginning of this year. I
| moved most of my "aimlessly scrolling through stuff" from
| Reddit to lemmy.ml .
| porlw wrote:
| The thing I miss about Usenet is maintaining article and comment
| scoring in trn (based on the subject, keywords and/or author)
|
| With this I could easily surface interesting articles or replies
| by insightful people, while avoiding subjects and authors in
| which I had no interest.
|
| This worked at a thread level, so I could quickly see any new
| threads, and new replies added to threads I was following,
| skipping over everything I had already marked as read.
|
| For me this was more effective than the communal post scoring
| that took over on web forums, reddit, hn etc.
| bfuller wrote:
| Telegram is really a great organizational app and social
| platform. I created and sold a startup based solely on telegram
| interactions.
| aaron695 wrote:
| epilys wrote:
| I wrote a dependency tree python3 library to make your own NNTP
| servers:
|
| https://pypi.org/project/nntpserver/0.0.3/
|
| https://github.com/epilys/nntpserver.py
|
| It's used in my link aggregator forum, https://sic.pm/ which also
| has a mailing list bridge functionality.
|
| As a demo, I have implemented a HN mirror on NNTP: (quoting
| README.md)
|
| hnnntp.py querying news.ycombinator.com (hackernews) API and
| caching results in an sqlite3 database. A public instance might
| be online at nessuent.xyz:564 (TLS only)
| justusthane wrote:
| Maybe check out some Tilde servers? https://tildeverse.org/
|
| Some of them run their own NNTP servers as well.
| sehro wrote:
| Does that link rick roll everyone, or just me?
|
| EDIT: Turns out was from a cached point in time where it was
| doing that.
| kixiQu wrote:
| Everyone clicking through from hacker news
| onion2k wrote:
| The main difference between Usenet and Reddit/SO/etc was posting
| speed. The Usenet groups I posted in were _slow_ by today 's
| standards. No one expected an immediate response, and the groups
| didn't hide things after a few hours. Paging back through 5 or 6
| pages of threads in `tin` was common. The equivalent today is
| probably a subject-specific mailing list.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Usenet died for a number of reasons, and those reasons are core
| to what has kept any revival of NNTP-based forums, or strongly-
| similar variants / derivatives, from succeeding.
|
| I've given my own take on this (just one random space alien cat's
| take, some familiarity, no major at-the-coalface experience) in a
| piece that's seen some currency, "Why Usenet Died", posted at ...
| Reddit:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...
|
| The TL;DR:
|
| 1 It got spammed to death.
|
| 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial
| to its functioning.
|
| 3. It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready
| access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright
| violations all posed massive concerns.
|
| 4. There was no viable business model for providing the service.
|
| Beyond that:
|
| There has been a Usnet 2.0, or rather, Usenet II
|
| The original Usenet was small and had very limited access. As of
| April, 1988, there were 381 newsgroups, 57,979 messages, an
| estimated 141,000 readers, of a total user population on
| connected hosts of 880,000, via Brian Reid's "USENET Readership
| Summary Reports". Virtually all were at selective-admissions
| universities, tech companies, and a small selection of government
| agencies.
|
| (In many ways, 1980s Usenet was the equivalent of edu-only
| Facebook. Think through that a few times.)
|
| Usenet had many useful features ... and failings. Much of
| Usenet's decentralisation and client-independence meant that bad
| nodes, general adversaries, and flouting of tradition (the
| Eternal September, spammers, AOL, ...) could destroy it.
|
| Usenet had little to no archival, filtering, or spam protections.
| There were attempts to bolt on solutions. Those ... fared poorly
| in general, either in effectiveness or unintended consequences.
|
| In _spirit_ and _role_ , the closest thing to Usenet for the
| moment is probably Reddit. For anyone interested in my views on
| Reddit, see the recent and pinned posts in
| https://old.reddit/r/dredmorbius
|
| Much of Usenet's early success was a direct result of its
| institutional foundation: selective-admissions, computer-science-
| heavy research universities. Those had a group-communications
| problem, and could support the infrastructure for a solution, but
| couldn't scale appreciably beyond the million or so member
| community of late 1980s / early 1990s Usenet. Today's Internet is
| global, is non-selective, has no common culture (other than,
| perhaps, advertising and other forms of behavioural
| manipulation), and no domimant institution (with the same
| exception). This bodes poorly for re-emergence of any Usenet-type
| mechanism.
|
| Another chief problem is that static group forums have their own
| strengths and weaknesses, but among those is overhead and
| latency. This is exhibited on Usenet itself in the huge land-rush
| of newsgroups defined when world+dog decided that they had to be
| there ... most of which turned into unmoderated and unused
| wastelands, either flooded with spam or entirely empty. Slapping
| labels on room plaques does not a community make.
|
| You can still spin up your own limited-access NNTP server, and
| run email and Web-based gateways. I've been active on the
| Fediverse for over a decade (Diaspora _, Mastodon), and though
| there 's some similarities, and considerable shared individuals,
| the scope is not the same, and group discussion in particular is
| ... not well-facilitated. (There are bolt-ons, e.g., gup.pe on
| Mastodon.)
|
| Email lists and IRC (which _does* support pretty flexible
| temporary channel creation) are other options, both of which
| afford control and free-flowing forum characteristics.
| dym_sh wrote:
| discord /s
|
| every specialized sub-group now holds small portion of the web
| by/for themselves and only needs to interact with those of same
| mindset -- no need to keep every single word in public forever.
|
| but what you really missing is people of the same~ish age-group
| having enough time and topics to argue about
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